There has recently been increased interest in the roles of guilds in
cultural production during the later Middle Ages, which has coincided
with increased attention to guilds on the part of many economic
historians. Christina M. Fitzgerald's The Drama of Masculinity and
Medieval English Guild Culture is a welcome addition to the
literature side of this growing body of scholarship, and this book
shows the potential for literary scholars to build on influential
historical scholarship in interesting ways. The book's overall thesis
is that the two English dramatic cycles closely tied to particular
places, those of York and Chester, actually belong to a different
genre from the other less localized cycles, Towneley and N-Town. She
labels this new genre the "drama of masculinity," and the bulk of the
book undertakes a close reading of the two cycles, arguing that they
address the "contingent, shifting, performative nature of masculinity"
within the male-dominated urban guild environment (164). In support of
this overall reading of the two cycles, she also dedicates an early
chapter to a description of that social world, with particular
attention to the tension between guildsmen's professional and domestic
responsibilities. Fitzgerald's methodology is unabashedly New
Historicist with a touch of poststructuralist feminism, complete with
a reference to Clifford Geertz's "thick description" (9), Michel
Foucault's "docile bodies" (12), and an nuanced adaptation of Judith
Butler's theories of gender performativity to a medieval context.

Like any adapted dissertation (Fitzgerald acknowledges her work with
V. A. Kolve at UCLA), this book starts with a somewhat theorized
introduction, laying out her methodology and the larger context for
her work. This chapter has effectively made the transition to
introducing a scholarly book, and Fitzgerald situates her work amidst
recent scholarship on medieval drama, particularly books by Larry
Clopper and Sarah Beckwith. She also positions herself theoretically,
and it is here that this chapter does reveal some limitations. While
her materialist approach makes a great deal of sense for this
material, and she executes it well throughout the study, her handling
of gender theory is too much exiled to the endnotes. Fitzgerald writes
an excellent endnote, and her notes on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and
Judith Butler (166-67n.) both cover a great deal of ground, but
readers who see her title and expect a sustained overview of how
contemporary gender theory has been applied to medieval culture will
be disappointed. She works well with gender theory, and particularly
with sophisticated work by other medieval literary scholars like
Beckwith and Ruth Evans, but it is a pity that the theoretical portion
of the Introduction does not address gender more directly.

The other greatest limitation of this study comes in Chapter 1, which
provides an overview of "Men in the Household, Guild, and City" (13).
The book certainly needs such an overview, and in many respects this
chapter is well-researched. Fitzgerald provides her reader with an
articulate and largely nuanced understanding of how the social
structure of the late-medieval city created and the cycle plays
deployed a "double bind of normative masculine identity in late
medieval English guild culture, caught between duties: domestic and
civic, homosocial and familial" (39). This chapter is, however, far
too dependent on the work of Heather Swanson, particularly Swanson's
book Medieval Artisans: An Urban Class in Late Medieval England
and article "The Illusion of Economic Structure: Craft Guilds in Late
Medieval English Towns." [1] Both of these historical works have had
genuine influence, and bring a necessary corrective to earlier
tendencies to take at face value the idealizing tendencies of medieval
guild ordinances and civic records in general. Fitzgerald relies so
heavily on Swanson's work, however, that any reader who might be
skeptical of Swanson's historiography will necessarily transfer that
skepticism to Fitzgerald's entire project. Gervase Rosser's mixed
review of Swanson's book in The Economic History Review, for
example, questions Swanson's totalizing impulse in her thesis that
guilds were entirely a form of social control, [2] but Fitzgerald
takes Swanson's thesis at face value throughout The Drama of
Masculinity. This is not to say that Fitzgerald's historical
research is flawed, as it is not: many scholars think highly of
Swanson's work, and Fitzgerald does also lean on a number of the most
influential historians of medieval society and gender in recent
decades, including J. M. Bennett, P. J. P. Goldberg, Barbara Hanawalt,
and Martha C. Howell. Still, Swanson's vision of the guilds of York
predominates in Chapter 1, and requires far more defense than
Fitzgerald provides. It is also unexpected that in a book focusing so
much on York, Fitzgerald never cites Jenny Kermode's work.

Once The Drama of Masculinity gets to its main project, it
starts to hit its stride more consistently. While the nature of
literary study is such that not all readers will agree with
Fitzgerald's close readings, she presents many valuable insights about
the relationships portrayed in the York and Chester cycles. As one
example, her suggestion that since female characters might well have
been played by apprentices, and that therefore the male-female
relationships in the plays would also have an element of an
apprentice-master relationship (see, e.g., pp. 44ff), suggests a
valuable way in which to think about economic relationships beyond the
literal plots of the plays. She also refers effectively throughout to
the use of economic language in the plays, and how it might relate to
the social and economic realities of the late-medieval urban contexts
of the plays. A closer look at how much of that language is in the
Biblical and extra-Biblical sources for the plays might have been
useful, but on the whole her conclusions seem reasonable enough. The
close-reading portion of the book takes up three chapters, with one
dedicated to the depiction of domestic relationships early in the
cycles, another dedicated to homosocial and public relationships
primarily in the New Testament sections of the plays, and a final
chapter looking at Christ as a masculine role model in the cycles. The
three chapters are not even in length, as Chapters 2 and 3 cover much
more ground in the cycles than does Chapter 4, but all of them
meticulously attend to textual details, and consistently apply the
historical understanding established in Chapter 1.

In Chapter 2, Fitzgerald focuses on the plays about Adam and Eve,
Noah, Abraham and Isaac, the troubles of Joseph, and the Chester
"Massacre of the Innocents." The York "Massacre of the Innocents" is
saved for Chapter 3. All of these plays within the cycles focus on
family relationships, and Fitzgerald effectively connects them to the
social world of the medieval cities of York and Chester. As an example
of how her approach bears fruit, her reading of York's "Joseph's
Troubles about Mary" puts Joseph's commitment to raise Mary' child as
his own in the context of urban apprenticeship, where artisans
routinely raised other families' children in their own households
(81ff.). She similarly brings in cultural connections with each of the
plays discussed; the strongest section is probably the one dedicated
to the Noah story, where she argues for the York play of "The Building
of the Ark" as a model of idealized apprenticeship, with God in the
role of Noah's master and teacher (64ff.).

Chapter 3 then looks at the public relationships of guildsmen, and
seeks for resonances in the cycle plays. This chapter focuses more
heavily on Chester than York, though a few sections are more oriented
towards the latter. As most of her historical context is from better-
documented York, this focus on Chester sometimes requires the reader
to accept a lot of "mays" and "ifs." Fitzgerald looks at the Chester
"Fall of Lucifer" as "a lesson about the consequences of disobedience
to authority" (99) aimed as much at its performers, the Tanners, as at
the general audience. Her model of the play text as a form of social
control, requiring guilds annually to perform and pay for their own
subordination, is particularly interesting, though it would be
stronger if we had a clearer idea of just who wrote these plays. Later
sections on the Shepherds' plays and those about the Magi add to this
sense of public relationships being worked out on stage, and lead to
her discussion of the York "Slaughter of the Innocents." Her decision
to put the Chester and York plays on this subject in different
chapters works well, both in that these plays really do fit better
that way, but also to correct the overall tendency in a study of this
nature to blur the distinctions between the York and Chester cycles.
Later sections in this chapter on plays about Christ's ministry, the
disciples, and the events leading to the Passion then contribute to
Fitzgerald's sense of how the plays enact and question the various
homosocial bondings within larger guild culture.

With her final chapter, Fitzgerald then focuses on the figure of
Christ, arguing that the cycles present him as a role model of a
specifically guild masculinity: "a model of self-sacrifice, of self-
erasure, of absence--in other words, of compliance with normative
ideals of masculinity--in the name of fortitude" (150). She contrasts
this depiction of Christ with the "feminized" (146) Christ of
affective piety, and is quite emphatic that she does not see the
depiction of the Passion in the Chester and York cycles as "affective
devotion to Christ's sufferings" (146). She makes a reasonable case
that the nature of performance would have emphasized Christ's
masculinity as a series of men played him in the plays (150). Her
analysis of ideal masculinity in terms of sacrifice and silence is one
of the more interesting parts of the book, and it is a pity that this
chapter is by far the shortest of the three dedicated to the actual
cycles. This chapter might also have benefitted from more
contextualization within contemporary gender theory, to allow her to
draw her conclusions further. She does good work at adapting gender
studies scholars like Sedgwick and Butler to a medieval context, and
it would be worth seeing her take her thinking further.

On the whole this book is well-researched, meticulously grounded in
the literary texts, and well-argued. Fitzgerald is surely correct that
we can profitably examine the York and Chester cycles in terms of
their performance of gender, and that they reveal real tensions
between different aspects of masculine identity for the guildsmen who
supported and performed the plays. As one would expect in any large
study dedicated to a pair of very large works, however, she does tend
to imply that her approach to these texts is the best one, but she
works hard to avoid a completely totalizing reading. There are plays
in both cycles that she does not discuss, and related issues that she
might have explored further in a longer study, but she has made a
significant contribution to the study of these cycles.